"O Cross of Christ, all-holy, thrice-blessed, and life-giving, instrument of the mystical rites of Zion, the holy Altar for the service of our Great Archpriest, the blessing - the weapon - the strength of priests, our pride, our consolation, the light in our hearts, our mind, and our steps"Met. Meletios of Nikopolis & Preveza, from his ordination.

Mrs Y that is the funniest thing I have seen all week! As a connoisseur of Mario and it's music really appreciated it. Mr. Y how would one go about building such a thing? not step by step but just basic.

"The music that you hear is coming from the sparks that these two identical high power solid state Tesla coils are generating. There are no speakers involved. The Tesla coils stand 7 feet tall and are each capable of putting out over 12 foot of spark. They are spaced about 18 feet apart. The coils are controlled over a fiber optic link by a single laptop computer. Each coil is assigned to a midi channel which it responds to by playing notes that are programed into the computer software."

Ebor

(who thinks this would be a Very Cool family project for the back yard)

Logged

"I wish they would remember that the charge to Peter was "Feed my sheep", not "Try experiments on my rats", or even "Teach my performing dogs new tricks". - C. S. Lewis

A somewhat more elaborate explanation: the Tesla coil is essentially an RF high voltage transformer; the sparks make sound by punching a hole in the air. Your typical coil operates in the middle kHz to MHz range, which means that the sound of continuous sparking at one power level is ultrasonic and all you here is a hiss. However, you can modulate the power output with an audio signal and then the high frequency sound generating of the RF signal serves as an AM carrier for the audio sound. It sounds terribly distorted on most of them because it is; when the sound source is actual sparks, the all-or-nothing conduction of the sparks clips the daylights out of the audio signal, and you hear a lot of fuzz. If you set it up for corona discharge instead, you can get darn good sound reproduction.